Lacy Eye
by Jessica Treadway
Copyright: 2015
Pages: 339
Read: July 4 – 6, 2017
Rating: 4/5
Source: Book of the Month Club
Blurb: Hanna and Joe send their awkward daughter Dawn off to college hoping that she will finally “coming into her own.” When she brings her new boyfriend, Rud, to her sister’s wedding, her parents try to suppress their troubling impressions of him for Dawn’s sake. Not long after, Hanna and Joe suffer a savage attack at home, resulting in Joe’s death and Hanna’s severe injury and memory loss.
Rud is convicted of the crime, and the community speculates that Dawn may also have been involved. When Rud wins an appeal and Dawn returns to live in the family home, Hanna resolves to recall that traumatic night so she can testify in the retrial, exonerate her daughter, and keep her husband’s murderer in jail.
But as those memories resurface, Hanna faces the question of whether she knows her own daughter – and whether she ever did.
Review: If you have never read this book, stop reading this. There will be a few spoilers in this review.
Still with me? Good. So here’s the thing…. Hanna is an idiot! Plain and simple. Anyone with half a brain would realize within the first chapter that something was seriously wrong with Dawn. First of all, no 20-something woman will call her mother “Mommy” that’s just not normal in my opinion. Also, it was painfully obvious that something was “off” with Dawn from a very early age, teachers mentioned this multiple times … and yet, they never sought any help for her. I know it’s difficult to see your children in any light other than perfection, but at some point in time you have to get your head out of the sand and face reality that perfection does not exist and that there may be something needing attention. I was just flabbergasted at how Hanna’s character was portrayed throughout the entire book. As a mother it was really discouraging for me to read and I can only hope that I would not ignore any of those warning signs in my own children.
Moving on … overall I enjoyed the book. It gripped me from the very beginning and I found it hard to put down. I was pretty well convinced that I already knew the truth behind the attack rather early on, so there wasn’t any great big surprise. But it was still interesting to see the psychology behind all the characters and the decisions they made. It was well written, and I enjoyed reading it. I just had the little problem with the naiveté of Hanna’s character. If it hadn’t been for that, this would most definitely had been a 5 star book for me.
So yeah, I’d definitely recommend this book. You probably won’t have any huge surprises along the way while reading this book, but it was still a good solid read. I’m only upset that I waited so long to read this one!
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